 we had the tech crunch disrupt and who are you? I'm Linold I handle marketing for Radix which is a new domain registry. What we're doing here is basically be on these new domain extensions. So you have that website, that store, that post, that press, that space, that tech. I got a few dot techs already. So these domains are quite cool right? They're amazing I mean look at it just just the fact that they're so self-explanatory just if you have a dot tech you already know what the website is about. If you have a dot press you know it's going to be something to do with news journalism. If it's a dot store I don't even need to tell you what's going to be there on it. I go around to Shenzhen and stuff I tell everybody just get a dot tech. This is a good thing for tech companies, they can get a dot tech. Yes. So how is it possible that you have this what happened like there was some kind of auction kind of thing? Yes so four years back ICANN which is the organization that handles policy for the internet actually opened up applications for new domain registries or new domain extensions and we were one of the companies that applied for them. We applied for quite a few of them and after that we had to go through a process in which some of them had to be we had multiple applicants for them for example dot tech and dot store are ones that had. Did you compete with Google and Amazon? Yes we did actually. Dot store actually was one of the ones that we competed with Google and Amazon and we won it in an auction. How did you win? How did you do to beat them? I mean that's it's an auction that it's a closed auction that we had to just pay more. Basically. That's it. There's no like conditions. There is a condition about when you're applying for the domain name obviously the I mean ICANN checks whether you have the technical capabilities and the financial capabilities to actually run the registry but once that's done it's basically the auction. So what is Radix? Is that your company? What do you do with Radix? I handle marketing for Radix. Radix is part of a bigger conglomerate known as DirectEye. DirectEye Group of Companies. We are based out of India and this is what we do. Radix is a domain name registry. It's not in London, not in UK. We don't have any offices in London UK but we work worldwide through partners like GoDaddy, Name.com, Namecheap, 1-in-1, 1-to-3reg all the guys. So I think it's very very cool that there's a new top-level domain. There's lots of new ones. Yes. But how is it with pricing and are there any free ones? So pricing for various, first of all let me get to all the questions that you ask. The first one is yes there are a lot of new top-level domains. There are almost a thousand of them but luckily we own some of the best ones right now. We have eight as of now. We're still acquiring more. So the next one to come up would be Dot Fun which would be launching somewhere early next year. We'll be launching that soon. Let's confirm you got it. We've already got it. Are there some that are still being discussed? There are a few that are still being discussed. So you don't want to talk about those? No, not right now. It's not the right time to talk about those. So there are tons of them actually. So yeah we own these eight out of them. We've already sold about two million domains on them and you'll find most of them doing really really well. Dot Store was our latest launch which happened about three months back and yeah we've got some really kick-ass websites on it already. Is there any chance that you could see a business model or be allowed to give them out for free for people to actually use them and somehow make money some other way? That's a I mean we could but I mean companies could but we wouldn't look at that because our co-competence is in the domain names and we'll sell them for now. So it starts at how much? Depending on where you buy them and which TLD you're looking at it can be priced anywhere from about a couple of dollars to about 30 to 40 dollars a year. So for example something like Store might be more expensive because it's commercial? Correct. Dot Store is a little bit I wouldn't say expensive but it's priced a little bit higher than maybe a dot site and that's because of not only it's commercial it's also because of the audience that we're looking at. We're looking at companies in e-commerce in retail. So that target audience is much smaller and at the same time they're much more serious. We don't want we want to keep the pricing at such a point where not anyone just gets the name and use it for anything. We want specific companies to use it only serious companies to use it. Is it public what you paid for being the ones that own Dot Tech? It is you can check it out. Dot Tech I think is public the other ones aren't. I'm not too sure right now so I wouldn't want to comment without exactly doing the price. But basically you're allowed to do whatever you want once you have it? So when we apply for the domain extension we actually put down our business plans and we submit those to ICANN. Those have been reviewed some of them. All our business plans are fine because our business model is quite straightforward but there are people who are doing something different with the domain names. You could do something else keep it closed for example. There's some people making money with that but let's say I even saw the couple domains because people asked me but I wish they were not all these people that just buy domains and just for selling them. I know that's that happens to all domain names. We cannot prevent it but we do that's where pricing comes into play. So that's why we're not going to price our domains really really low. If we do then we do get a lot of people buying them and just squatting on them. That's why some of our domains would be priced a little higher like I said dot store dot tech dot host. These would be priced higher so that prevents people from actually buying them in stock and just sitting on them. Can you like have a system that there would be a way to use AI or whatever and like Google could do an API to check if the domain is actually ever being used to just park for you know. That's not the best way to do it because there are a lot of people who would want to buy the domain name for brand protection. Say for example TechCrunch wants to protect all its brand across all extensions. They would still buy all the domain names but wouldn't actually use them. That's so that nobody else uses TechCrunch dot store to sell their someone else's products on them. So that still is. But they shouldn't be needing to buy them. Nobody should be allowed to take TechCrunch. So we have a process for that in place. Before we launch any TLD we have a 60-day period called the sunrise period where only trademark holders are allowed to register but after that it needs to be open call. Because I'd like to see more people use the web and not just what's called shark the web you know like domain. And I think in a way we are helping out. Too many domain sharks. But if there's just more more domain sharks now or not. So I don't think it's affected the number of people actually squatting or actually purchasing domain just to hold on to. In any way what we have done is actually given an opportunity for people who didn't get domain names earlier to actually work on these domain names now. They can get the choice of domain name that they want and actually build a business on it. So I think in that way we're definitely helping out. All these startups are using these kind of domains right? Oh yeah that's a brilliant I can name a few. We actually have a couple of startups using a .tech domain name over here. We have Convy.Tech and Horace.Tech in the startup alley right now. And you can see a lot of them. We had about 20 odd startups at Web Summit using our domain extensions. And that's growing. Everywhere you'll see people getting onto these extensions so that they can get the best name that they want. I saw .Google. No need .com anymore. It just called Google and it shows up. How about these big guys? Do you know what they're doing? Are they yet letting people register all the ones that they got? Oh yes so let me like tell you a couple of examples. Yeah a couple of examples. So for example .store is being used by NBA. So you go to NBA.store. We've got a couple names right here. So you can go to NBA.store. CES.Tech. They had CES Web before. They had CES Web.org earlier. And that's why it makes sense. CES.Tech tells you exactly what it is. They also renamed their company to CTA.Tech. So that's basically everyone's already using these extensions. But how about all these thousands that are there? Which one is most popular? Amongst all the extensions. So it depends where you're looking and what you mean by popular. If it's just in terms of sales. In terms of registration is very different because a lot of TLDs are being sold for very low prices. Amongst our own extensions I can tell you that .site is doing really well. It's sold over 600,000 names. .tech is sold over half a million names. .store is just launched. .online was actually one of our biggest launches ever. We sold 34,000 names in the first day itself. All of them are doing really, really well. In totality we've sold over 2 million names amongst these. And you can see a lot of them already on the Lexa 1 million ranking. There's so many people in the world. Everybody needs a domain. It's not nice that they have to get a very long, complicated name. It needs to have a short name. Yeah, short one makes sense. People are not going to remember the long domain name. It's not going to make sense. No one's going to type it in. Getting a short name is very difficult now on the .com. That's where we come in. There's no chance you're going to just let people have it for free if they use it. That's something we can explode, but I don't think that would help us in a lot of ways. Keep saying three times in the video. Okay, thanks. Cool. That's awesome. Okay, something host. Something press. My. That space. No, maybe not. And lots of cool domains right here.